Task-centric UI

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Am Montag, 8. Oktober 2012, 19:25:08 schrieb Thomas Pfeiffer:
> On 08.10.2012 17:05, Marco Martin wrote:
> > On Monday 08 October 2012, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> >> I've already thought about application integration as a future topic a
> >> bit.
> >> What came to my mind was Björn Balasz' presentation at the KDE UX sprint
> >> April 2011 about task-centered interfaces. The general idea current
> >> application-centric desktop shells are not really compatible with users'
> >> mental models. A user doesn't think "I want to start Kmail touch", but
> >> instead "I want to write an email to Grandma". However currently she
> >> first
> >> has to think "Okay, what application do I have to start to write an
> >> email?".
> > 
> > this is not a new idea at all, i think it was kindof tried in the past
> > with
> > various degrees of success, at least in the old old days with document
> > oriented uis (kindof a subset of task oriented, not enough anymore) as
> > back
> 
> in
> 
> > the days as apple lisa, early next, beos.
> 
> Yes, describing document-oriented UIs as a subset of taks-oriented ones
> pretty much nails it. A really task-oriented UI goes a bit beyond that.
> But sure, the idea is not new, since it makes sense from a user's
> perspective.
> > one thing that always killed it is a "branding" issue, is very difficult
> > to
> > make this work well with 3rd party developers.
> 
> Of course it killed it in the commercial world. Commercial developers want
> _their_ application to stand out, regardless of what's best for the user.
> 
> > The iphone-esque "apps" approach presents really the path of minimum
> > resistance for 3rd parties, little difficulties and a lot of freedom for
> > developers (weird to hear about freedom on the iphone, but being an app a
> > little universe on its own, in this case applies)
> > But is the best way for users? not so sure
> 
> Exactly. It's ideal for commercial 3rd party developers but fragments the
> user experience.
> 
> > we should learn from the past mistakes, and *maybe* we can pull it off,
> > since we are in a considerably legacy free environment. We are also free
> > to try
> this
> 
> > because since we really can't win the "Apps" game, we can try to just play
> > a different game ;)
> 
> That's precisely why I think we as a thriving Free Software community are in
> a far better position to pull it off than the players in the
> proprietary/commercial world.



> I don't say that we should force every application to fit into our
> task-centric scheme, but even with applications from the KDE community only
> we could already come a long way toward a seamless task-centric experience
> for most or all common tasks. If 3rd-party-developers want their
> application to stand out instead of fitting in, they can still make it so.
> But they should not come whining if users prefer the streamlined experience
> of community applications.
> > (i would love the desktop going in this direction as well, but this is
> > another, long, complex story :p)
> 
> I'd love that too, but that would be the long-term goal. I think Plasma
> Active is an ideal testbed for new ideas (see SLC for example) which can
> then move over to the desktop if they are successful.

Or perhaps the other way around ;)

Having a desire for a task/document-oriented system myself as well but never 
having enough time to spare away for it besides lots of plans/ideas, this year 
I proposed as a start the project 'Global "New document" menu' for GSoC, see
http://community.kde.org/GSoC/2012/Ideas#Project:_Global_.22New_document....22_menu

While not picked for GSoC, still picked for SoK, though my student Amanjot has 
had a step learning curve to master due to no real Qt/kdelibs/Plasma/UI design 
experience before. So currently our aim is "reduced" to something achievable, 
an applet to create new office-type documents from the templates installed for 
LO, by selecting an template from the list in the applet and then 
automatically having the new document in LO created and opened to start 
editing right away.
Not completely there yet, but progressing all the time.

For the northern-hemisphere winter time I plan to jump on the document/file 
creation stuff myself, and see to get more of my plans/wishes/needs/ideas 
implemented, fingers crossed. So let's please ping each other if we start to 
sketch more code/UX in this direction.

Next step for me in any case:
urging LibreOffice, Calligra & Co. to use a same standardized place and order 
in the filesystem for the template files, at least in the open/standardized 
formats. Those ego-centric suites! ;)
Well, for Calligra I have even a proof-of-concept patch to also offer the 
templates from the LO places, but then that is just a workaround.

</heads up>

Cheers
Friedrich